Anodyne
by Juno42
Summary: an•o•dyne (ˈæn əˌdaɪn) n. 1. anything that relieves pain or distress.


an•o•dyne (ˈæn əˌdaɪn)

n.

1. anything that relieves pain or distress.

* * *

Mike Waters seemed to have a very calming effect on people. Mike, of course, was completely oblivious to this, and had to have it pointed out to him.

Whether the individual members the gang liked Bob or not, he had been, at least, one of the only consistencies in many of their lives there on the street corners of Portland. The loss of such a figurehead would cause most such groups to crumble into disarray out of sheer pathos. Perhaps it was some subconscious awareness of this fact, and an equally unconscious resistance to any further upheaval, which somehow drew the denizens of Pigeon's gang even tighter together.

About ten days after Bob Pigeon's funeral, on a particularly chilly late autumn night, Mike came out of a doze to find himself sandwiched shoulder-to-shoulder between Budd and Digger in the foyer of the abandoned hotel. The gang had never been organized enough, or hierarchical enough, to have an inner circle, but that night found the dozen or so most regular members all clustered around the perforated firing barrel, swapping stories of fact and fiction, and to pool the only other resource they had to offer besides their virtues: a body temperature of roughly ninty-eight and a half degrees.

* * *

Digger was in fact just finishing up an anecdote from a month ago or so - one that concerned Mike. Digger was still holding down a job at a food vendor's, which meant he didn't need to hustle much anymore, but he still didn't make enough money yet to afford any sort of rent, even if he'd found roommates, so he still spent most nights at the hotel. That morning Mike had stopped over to say hi to him in passing when a mild disturbance nearby caught their attention.

A teenaged girl threaded her way through the pedestrians on the sidewalk towards them. She was maybe eighteen, slender, dark-haired and pale eyed, dressed in no particular class bracket style. She did not walk straight ahead, but zigzagged across the sidewalk, pausing when she changed direction, as though she were trying to thread an invisible maze. She spoke as she walked, answering questions only she could hear. Her face was expressionless but her eyes were intense and feral. And she was slowly making her way in their direction.

As they watched, of her ricochetting routes brought her past Mike. As she came alongside him, she suddenly halted in her track, turned towards him and grabbed his hand. Mike started, but did not try to pull away. It probably wouldn't have done any good if he had, she had a grip like the jaws of a tax collector! Mike stared into those mad eyes, but she did not look back at him, her gaze focused intently on an invisible point just short of his collar-bone.

After perhaps five long seconds, she resumed walking, this time dragging Mike along after her. Digger watched as Mike stumbled off in her erratic wake, and saw him turn back just before they rounded the corner of the block, with the expression of one who doesn't know whether he should be terrified or not. Digger hurriedly announced to his boss that he was going to take his break, and jogged down the block to catch up with them.

Digger followed them all the way around the block and back to the vendor. Sometime along the way the girl had managed to shift her grip to Mike's arm, so that he was compelled to walk beside her instead of being yanked after her. Mike looked over his shoulder at Digger a couple of times to shrug at him in bafflement. But he seemed to have decided that fear wasn't immediately called for anymore, at least. Digger's boss watched them with curiosity as they sailed by, and Digger passed the baffled shrug on the him and kept following.

As they made their way around the block for a second time, they both noticed a change in their guide. The girl's agitation gradually melted down, and her desperate headlong pace eventually throttled back to a more casual stroll. She had stopped muttering to empty air, and while her gaze still darted here and there at apparently nothing, whatever she saw didn't appear to frustrate her as much as it had earlier. Digger was finally able to catch up and keep pace behind them, so he heard her when she grumbled to Mike's shoulder patch, or perhaps to Mike, "Don't listen to them. They don't know what they're talking about."

As they rounded the last corner and approached the vendor again, they could see a middle aged woman conversing frantically with Digger's boss, who, in response to her query, turned and pointed them out to her. When the lady spotted the girl she heaved a visibly relieved sigh a trotted towards them.

"Where on earth have you _been?_" she demanded of the girl, "I told you to stay _put!_" The girl coasted to a halt as the woman reached them and grasped her by the arm, but other than that appeared not to notice her at all. Mike and Digger couldn't decide later if she was just ignoring the woman magnificently, or genuinely hadn't registered her. They concluded the latter since, in spite of all the girl's forcefulness earlier, she put up no resistance to this woman.

"I'm so sorry if she bothered you," said the woman to Mike and Digger. "We were over at the laundromat, and I told her to stay in her seat, but-" She when on for a minute or so about how unpredictable the girl was, and she's never done something like this before, and how she hoped they hadn't been inconvenienced, etcetera. Mike and Digger hastened to reassure the woman than there was no harm done, since it seemed like she might start babbling if they didn't head her off. The girl stood placidly through the exchange, staring at nothing, still holding Mike by the arm.

Thanking them profusely, the woman eventually pulled the girl away. But just as she did so, the girl turned her head and met Mike's gaze with here own. Just a glance. It wasn't a "thank you" glance, or even a "goodbye" glance. It was simply, "I'm aware of you."

Mike had never felt more appreciated, before or since.

* * *

"And then she actually looked at him," Digger was saying, "Then they turned the corner, and that was that."

Mike expected to hear some murmurings along the lines of "What a wacko," or "That hadda be fuckin' surreal, man." But most of them seemed to be sounds of some judicious agreement. As though what happened to Mike had gone only as expected. Even in his drowsy state, this made him curious.

"What?" Mike asked.

"It's just a you thing, man," Gary said, "You calm people down." More agreeable noises all around.

_Since when?_ Mike thought. "Naw, c'mon." he said.

"You totally do, though." Digger said, "I dunno how, but it works."

Mike was completely baffled by this. As far as he was concerned, he never had any effect on anything. He'd have noticed, right? "I never." he insisted. Some people chuckled.

Budd, who was still in a mild funk over the loss of Bob, and had be staring morosely into the fire from Mike's right, muttered, "C'mon, Mike. Remember when Wade got roofied last week?"

* * *

Mike did remember, but failed to see how it illustrated the point.

A week earlier, Wade had stumbled into base-camp, face white as salt, sweating profusely, looking haunted. He was hunched up, arms crossed, shaking like he was freezing. It was only late afternoon, and only Mike and a couple of others were lounging about in the lobby, hiding from the world. Mike had wedged himself between a couple of wall studs, head and shoulders slumped against one, feet braced against the other, trying not to drift off again. He had looked up with the others when Wade had come in, and was startled by his condition. Wade was a pretty cool, collected guy, and it was kind of alarming to see him look anything but chilled-out.

Wade had looked around the room, not really seeing it, the staggered over to where Mike was. He sank shakily to his knees, then just let himself tip forward, dropping forehead first against Mike's stomach. Wade's fingers were digging into his own upper arms and he shuddered deeply.

The invasion of his personal space didn't matter much to Mike anymore, as normally there wasn't much he could do about such things. But Wade wasn't really the touching sort normally, so his invasion of Mike's space was concerning. Mike, shook his shoulder slightly.

"Wade? You okay, man?"

Wade's voice was rough, trembling. "No…"

Mike pushed himself up slightly and brushed Wades hair back, trying to see his face. The eye on the side Mike could see was half-lidded and bloodshot, the pupil blown wide. "You trippin'?"

"Yes…"

"On what?"

"Don't know. They slipped me something." Wade pressed his face into Mike's stomach and fisted his hand into Mike's jacket. "Make it stop…" he groaned.

Mike was at a loss. "Should I… call 911 or something?"

The look of horror in Wade's eyes at that suggestion told him what he thought of _that!_

Mike looked around. He really had no clue what Wade wanted him to do. His bag was nearby, just out of reach, but he remembered having half a bottle of water in there somewhere. Arlene and another girl whose name he didn't recall were watching with concern from the bottom of the stairs. He motioned Arlene, indicating that she hand him his bag. When he found the water, she helped pull Wade up enough so that they could tip some of it down his throat. It seemed to help a little. Wade rested his head on Mike's trunk again, and Mike, not really knowing what else he could do for him, draped one arm over his shoulders and smoothed his hair back from his forehead. Gradually, Wade's shivering subsided and his eyes drifted shut.

They both must have drifted off at about the same time, because the next thing Mike knew he was blinking in the orange-tinged darkness of city night, and his position had changed. He was in the same place, but he had listed sideways, out of his folded-up position between the beams, and his head was pillowed on his bag. Wade was still asleep against him, head on his chest. Mike detected others around him. Glancing around, he saw Gary, just behind his bag, sleeping propped up against the wall-beam he had been leaning on earlier, arms crossed over his chest, snoring slightly. He had probably put Mike's bag under him when he nodded off. The wheezing sound at his left was Budd, lying with his back against Mike's shoulder. And on the other side of Wade he could detect someone's head propped on his right hip.

"Who…?" he whispered, trying not to wake Wade.

"It's me," came Digger's voice. "Arlene told us what happened. I warned Wade about that Brad guy."

"Oh." That sort of explained it. Brad was a forty-something frat-boy who liked picking up the local rent-boys as "favors" at his parties. Being a pharmacology major, Brad also liked to subject his rentals to some light "experimenting" with exotic drugs he's managed to pick up. The thing that kept the local hustlers accepting Brad's business was that he payed generously, allowed them the same same access as his guests to whatever was served at his parties, and so far there had never been any fatalities or hospitalizations as a result of any of his experiments. But one could easily come away from a Brad-bash with three days worth of hallucinations and other odd side-effects along with their enormous tips.

Mike put a hand to Wade's forehead again. He no longer felt so clammy, and his breathing was deep and regular. In his sleep, his face looked younger, guileless. Mike wondered if he looked that unguarded himself when he was asleep. Probably more so.

"When he wakes up, let's make sure he eats something." Digger said around a yawn.

"Mm." Mike agreed as he drifted off again.

* * *

"Well, yeah… I remember that, but I still don't…" Mike trailed off. He still didn't get it, and it was disconcerting for him to think that everyone else knew something about him that he himself wasn't aware of.

"Well, like I said, we just know that you do it. Wade knew it, even doped." Digger said, "We don't know how it works."

Mike squinted around the circle in the feeble firelight, trying to see if Wade was there tonight. Maybe he could clear this up. Mike spotted his hideous orange high-tops off to his right, but the rest of him was out of sight behind some people, because he had already decided to lie down and turn in for the night. So had most of the circle, for that matter, so it by unspoken agreement the few remaining stragglers decided it was bedtime, and just lay down where they sat.

Mike lay down as well, blinked up at the rafters for a while, still puzzling over the idea that he had stumbled into the role of the group's…what? Stress relief mechanism? Not only that, but he appeared to have been doing it for quite some time now. Long enough that everyone had caught on about it but he himself. As far as the Wade thing went, he had assumed Wade came to him because he was harmless. Compared to many of the others, Mike always felt like he was weaker, like a little rumpled up rodent. A creature that drops into a stupor at the first sign of trouble is pretty non-threatening. And when one is tripping balls on Frat-boy Brad's magical mystery dope, one would certainly gravitate towards whatever is least likely to threaten one. But this was the first time anyone had indicated there may be more to it than that.

Mike shook his head and shut his eyes firmly. Gary and Digger didn't know what they were talking about. It was just the fact that he was as dangerous as soggy cornflakes, that was all. It had to be.

What else could it possibly be?


End file.
